The future is brimming with possibilities due to the latest advancements in technology.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Google Search launched, allowing people to type in their questions and get answers within seconds.
Today, we can search in many ways, including images, voice, and even snapping a picture of what you want to buy. AI is supercharging Search and unlocking its full potential with new capabilities, such as AI overviews and Circle to Search.
Explore the top digital marketing trends and predictions for 2025. Google visionaries from across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have contributed to this article, to get you excited for what is next:
Dyana Najdi, Managing Director for Advertising, Google UK & Ireland
Media fragmentation, increasingly tight budgets, and ongoing privacy changes are putting media effectiveness in the spotlight for 2025.
Marketing mix models (MMMs) have always played a critical role here, helping brands cut through the noise to understand what’s really working in driving business impact.
However, there is a growing need — and demand — for more granular and actionable insights.
Once complex and costly, today’s MMMs are smarter, faster, and offer a holistic view of cross-channel performance.
Here’s what’s new for 2025:
- More granular: Modern MMMs can merge with other methodologies, such as incrementality testing and attribution, to provide more granular media insights.
- Wider availability: Google’s Meridian — an open-source MMM with access to both Google and YouTube data — is set for global rollout in early 2025 to meet the demand for a transparent and robust measurement solution.
- Quicker insights: Today’s MMMs can provide real-time insights, enabling swift responses to changes in the economy and demand. Additionally, Meridian extends MMM capabilities to encompass always-on channel Search to provide a view of marketing performance previously unattainable.
2025 is the year to master measurement. Start by aligning on KPIs, mapping your media spend, and building an experiments calendar. Measurement is an ongoing process, requiring continuous learning and optimisation to unlock your marketing’s full potential.
Guilliaume Roques, Senior director of Marketing for Google Cloud
If 2024 was the year of large language models, then 2025 is that of AI agents. These are intelligent software systems that can process multimodal information, which allows the agent to show reasoning, adapt, and think several steps ahead to help manage complex workflows.
Think of it as your “Chief Simplifier Officer”.
In marketing, AI agents can help with the complexities of managing and processing data. Many companies still have data spread across different systems, often in silos. Knowing where the right data is and bringing it together can take a lot of technical capabilities, such as creating a data lake. An AI agent can cut through this complexity.
For example: home improvement company Kingfisher, which owns brands such as B&Q and Screwfix, combined their recommendation engine and Vertex AI Search with enterprise data and conversational AI. This helped the company build an AI agent that can use text, voice, images, and video to help customers and employees quickly get the information they need.
The spread of AI agents will accelerate massively in 2025. This includes upgrades to existing AI tools, which will make AI agents more accessible. The newly launched Gemini 2.0, with its advanced reasoning and long context capabilities, is the first step in making multi-modal agents even more powerful in fulfilling their mission as Chief Simplifier Officer.
In the past, you had to change your information system to adopt technology, but AI agents put autonomous intelligence at your fingertips, empowering you to seamlessly integrate AI into your operations.
Alison Lomax, Managing Director for YouTube UK & Ireland
Social commerce revenues are forecasted to surpass $1 trillion USD by 2028. And with people increasingly buying what they see — 62% of viewers in the U.K. agree that YouTube helps them decide what to purchase1 — shoppable video presents a great opportunity for brands in 2025.
Marketers looking to tap into this trend should:
- Set up shop: Make YouTube videos shoppable by linking them to your Google Merchant Feed and adding product feeds to video campaigns. This will allow viewers to purchase products directly from videos.
- Turn ads into storefronts: Use Demand Gen campaigns with product feeds to amplify this approach and turn ads across YouTube and Google’s most visual surfaces into a virtual storefront. This will help more people discover your brand and products, driving them towards the point of sale.
- Partner with creators: Leverage creators’ authentic voices in partnership ads to engage users and extend reach. Then make these ads shoppable by adding the product feed, which makes the purchase just a click away.
By adopting shoppable video, marketers can create engaging and effective shopping experiences that drive sales and build brand long-term loyalty.
Read more of the Google article here for more expert opinions.